Her Mediterranean Playboy (16 page)

That, Zoe thought, was not true. Oh, she believed the first part, but not the second. Every line of Leandro’s powerful body was taut with tension, with suppressed anger. Whatever his family’s legacy was, it mattered very much indeed.

‘Did you ever live there before?’ she asked, and Leandro was silent for so long Zoe didn’t think he was going to answer.

‘Yes,’ he finally said tightly.

‘For how long?’

‘Thirteen years, as you’re so curious. I grew up there.’

Zoe shook her head slowly. She thought of the rooms full of antiques, portraits and keepsakes of a family that stretched on for generations. She remembered her fanciful imaginings of the people who’d lived and loved there. Leandro had, his ancestors had, for hundreds of years.

It was a dizzying thought for someone like her—someone who had no family or home, who knew no one but the mother who refused to answer questions, who preferred to pretend they’d both somehow sprung fully formed upon this earth, like Venus from the waves.

So much history, so much heritage, so many people and memories. And Leandro was giving it all away as if it was worth nothing. ‘I can’t believe you’re selling it,’ she said, her voice somewhere between a sigh and a scold, and Leandro turned to look at her sharply.

‘Why shouldn’t I? I can hardly live there now.’

‘Why not? Or at least when you marry, start a family—’ She swallowed, her mind suddenly filled with images of Leandro playing happy families—a child on his shoulder, an elegant,
appropriate
wife by his side.

‘I’m not going to marry or start a family,’ Leandro stated flatly.

Zoe raised her eyebrows. ‘Ever?’

‘Ever,’ he confirmed with a cold smile. ‘I shouldn’t think that would surprise
you
,’ he continued. ‘You don’t seem the marrying kind either.’

‘Don’t I?’ Zoe kept her voice light, but she bent her head, letting her hair fall forward as she trailed her fingers through the cool water again. She didn’t want Leandro to see how much those words stung. Hurt.

‘No, you don’t,’ he told her, his voice blunt and hard.

Zoe stiffened and looked up, and saw him gazing at her with a critical shrewdness that she didn’t like. At all.

‘You seem like the kind of girl who takes what she can get when she can get it. Who enjoys the ride and damns the consequences. Who doesn’t care…about anything.’

His voice was cutting, brutal, and Zoe blinked under the verbal onslaught. She was too shocked to feel anything at first, but as Leandro flicked the motor back on the feelings came. Hurt and humiliation, causing her cheeks to flush and her eyes to sting, making her remember the money Steve had thrown across the bed as he’d sneeringly told her he’d had enough.

Yet this wasn’t about Steve. It was about Leandro—the man sitting across from her, his body taut with tension and memory, his words an accusation and a judgement.

Anger fired through her, fuelling her. She reached out and grabbed Leandro’s arm, forcing him to slow the boat. He turned his head, his eyes flashing, his mouth no more than a thin, hard line.

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ Zoe said, her voice clear and hard.

Leandro’s lips thinned into a cold smile. ‘I’ve seen and experienced enough.’

‘Oh?’ She raised one eyebrow, still high on outrage. ‘You want to make assumptions, Leandro? Then I’ll go ahead and make a few of my own. You’re a man who is completely blinded by his past. I don’t know what your family did or didn’t do that’s made you so disgusted, so angry, but I do know that if I had a house like that—a
history
like that—I wouldn’t go throwing it away. I wouldn’t spit on it the way you are.’

‘You don’t know—’

‘No, I don’t. And you don’t know me either. You have no idea who I am or where I come from, what I’ve lived or seen or felt.
You don’t know.
’ Her voice shook, and she felt tears at the corners of her eyes. She drew a shaky breath and forced herself to continue. ‘So why don’t you just keep your lousy assumptions to yourself and take me home? Or should I just say back to the villa, since it obviously was never a home to you?’

Leandro stared at her for a long moment, his face expressionless, ominously blank. Then with a jerky nod he pushed hard on the throttle, sending them skimming across the water in angry silence.

They didn’t speak as Leandro tied the boat up to the dock, and Zoe scrambled onto the jetty without his help. Once inside the villa he disappeared into his study, and Zoe made her way upstairs to the sanctuary of her bedroom.

Except no respite was to be found there. She lay on the bed and watched the sun sink towards the horizon, her mind numb, her heart empty. Leandro’s words hammered relentlessly through her mind, her heart.

You seem like the kind of girl who takes what she can get when she can get it. Who enjoys the ride and damns the consequences. Who doesn’t care…about anything.

He’d summed her up so pithily, condemned her so readily—and in many ways he was right. That
was
who she’d been, who she’d had to be—at least on the outside. Act as if you don’t
care—or, better yet,
really
don’t care. Then you won’t be hurt when it’s time to move on, when Sheila decides she’s had enough.

Don’t cry, Zoe. The next place will be better…

And the next, and the next, and the next. There was always something better somewhere else. That had been her mother’s maxim, and Zoe had taken it as her own. She’d never known another way to live, and it was a
safe
way to live—you kept your heart guarded and had no home or family, nothing to care about.

Except somehow now she did. She hadn’t come to Italy to care. She’d come to escape, to forget Steve. And yet as she lay on her bed she realised Steve hardly mattered any more; he was no more than a smokescreen for the true feelings she had—feelings which scared her.

She cared.

She cared about Leandro, about the villa, about the charade of domesticity she’d been acting out in the last few days. For the first time in her life her home was more than a bedsit or a grotty hostel. Her life was more than a meaningless job.

How pathetic to think she’d found something here. Hadn’t Leandro made it clear what he thought of her?

Yet it both saddened and angered her to think that he had all this—all that she’d never had—and he was throwing it away.

Zoe brushed at the tears she hadn’t realised were falling, silently streaking down her face. Now, as dusk began to blanket the lake, causing long shadows to melt into each other, she fell into an uneasy doze.

When she awoke, disorientated and still drowsy, night had fallen, and the room was illuminated only by a sliver of moonlight. A shutter creaked and then banged shut in a gust of evening air—a haunting, lonely sound that propelled Zoe from her bedroom in search of some comfort, if not company.

She made her way downstairs, picking her way carefully through the dark, and found some more leftover pasta in the kitchen, eating it cold while standing by the sink.

She felt bruised all over—lonely and heartsore and just plain sad. Gazing out at the unending darkness—even the lake was empty of boats and their comforting lights due to the wind—she
decided to retreat back to her bedroom. Then, on the bottom stair, she heard a noise from the drawing room.

She hesitated, her hand curling around the cold iron railing as she listened. It had been two sounds, she realised: the clink of crystal and the more human sound of a sigh.

Still she didn’t move, weighing her options. Leandro had to be in there, alone. Did she want to see him? Talk to him?

Even as these thoughts and their implications flitted through her brain, she was already turning, drawn towards Leandro with the irresistible force of a magnet. With need. She hesitated for no more than half a second on the threshold—surely no good could come of this?—before pushing the door further open with her fingertips.

‘Well, hello.’

Zoe stiffened at Leandro’s unaccustomed drawl. The room was shrouded in darkness save for a single lamp in the corner, next to the chair he was sprawled in. His hair was rumpled, the top two buttons of his half-tucked shirt undone, and he held a tumbler of whisky in his hand.

Zoe hesitated, not sure how to handle Leandro like this. There was something sad, and even vulnerable about him, yet she refused to let her sympathy overcome her sense. His harsh words from this afternoon still reverberated in her mind, stung her soul, and even in the dim room she could see a dangerous glint in his eye.

‘Hello,’ she said a bit stiffly. ‘What are you doing?’

Leandro cocked an eyebrow, and Zoe flushed. It was a stupid question. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he said, lifting his glass. ‘I’m drinking.’

‘Drunk?’ Zoe interjected, and Leandro laughed, a sound without humour.

‘Not quite. Not yet.’ He gestured to the half-empty bottle on the sideboard. ‘Care to join me?’

‘No, thank you.’ Zoe knew she sounded prissy, but she didn’t care. She didn’t like Leandro in this mood—didn’t know what he might say. What could happen.

‘I thought you’d be good for at least one drink.’

‘You thought a lot of things about me,’ Zoe returned sharply.

‘So I did.’ Leandro turned his glass around in his hands, the
lamplight making the whisky glint amber and gold. ‘Are you trying to say they’re not true?’

‘Considering you summed me up as a mercenary trollop, then, yes, that
is
what I’m trying to say.’ Zoe clenched her fists, her nails biting into her palms.

‘Maybe I was too harsh,’ Leandro replied musingly. ‘But then so were you.’

‘About what?’

He was silent, still rotating his glass between his palms, and after a moment Zoe wondered if he’d even heard the question. Then he looked up, and her breath came out in a soft rush at the sorrow in his eyes.

‘You told me I was completely blinded by my past. That I’m spitting on my history, my family.’

He lapsed into silence again, his expression distant, and Zoe waited, caught between impatience and interest. And hope, strangely.

‘I don’t know why that disturbs me,’ he finally said. He looked up at her again. ‘
You
disturb me.’

‘I don’t mean to.’

‘Don’t you? You’re just like them, you know. At least I thought you were. Like all the others.’

He shook his head, and Zoe frowned. ‘What do you mean, all the others?’

He brushed her question aside, setting his glass down on the table with a clatter before sweeping his arm to take in the shabby faded room, the whole villa. ‘This villa was beautiful in its day. Do you know how long it’s been in the Filametti family? Five hundred years. It was given to my ancestor by Ludovico Sforza, for his help in the wars against Venice and Florence. And my family held on to it through Spanish and Austrian domination, the Napoleonic wars, the devastation of the Fascist party. Through all of it we survived.’

He shook his head—whether in disbelief or something darker, Zoe couldn’t tell.

‘So, if your family managed to survive all that, why are you selling it now?’ It was the obvious question, yet she still felt intrusive—insensitive—for asking it.

Leandro turned to look at her, and for a moment his eyes burned blue fire, pure rage. Then that brief light was extinguished, and he slumped back in his seat once more. ‘I’m proud of my heritage,’ he said. ‘Despite what you think. That is why I’m so ashamed of what has happened.’

Zoe took a step into the room, and then another. ‘What
has
happened?’

‘The Filametti family was ruined,’ Leandro replied simply, his voice more matter-of-fact than bleak. ‘Completely ruined.’

T
HE
statement seemed to have brought a new lucidity to Leandro, for he rose from the chair in one brisk yet fluid movement, and drained his glass before putting away the bottle of whisky.

Zoe watched him, unspeaking, not knowing what to say. There was a brittleness, she saw, to his movements; his face was averted from her. When he’d finished his tidying tasks he moved to the window, his back to her, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and gazed out into the night.

‘I used to play football out on the front lawn,’ he said after a moment. ‘My father loved the game. We played together.’ He spoke in the same flat voice he’d been using all along, yet Zoe thought she heard a thread of wistfulness underneath, a ghost of memory.

She moved a bit closer to him, still wary and uncertain, treading dangerous, uncertain ground. ‘And then?’

Lost in his own memories, Leandro didn’t seem to hear her. Or perhaps he chose not to hear. He simply continued talking. ‘We had parties in the summer, on the terrace. My sister and I used to hide under the tables and listen to the adults talking. They never said anything remotely interesting, though. There was always delicious food…
panettone, pastiocciotti
. We’d steal some when no one was looking.’ He shook his head, and as Zoe drew closer to him she saw the glimmer of a smile on his face, although his eyes were hard. Unforgiving.

‘And then?’ she asked again, for she knew instinctively that this was the beginning of the story, not the end.

‘Natale—Christmas—here was magical,’ he continued, as if trying to explain something to her. Prove something, even. ‘Candles in every window, a Yule log burning here in this room, and we’d walk to Midnight Mass in Lornetto. Once, even, there was snow. I tried to make a snowball, but it was no more than a dusting and it fell apart in my hands. My father laughed, and told me he would give me a snowball for Christmas. And he did. I don’t know how he managed it—he must have sent someone to the mountains to collect snow. He hid it in the freezer and made a treasure hunt for me to find it.’

Leandro lapsed into silence and Zoe stood next to him, her heart aching. These were the kinds of memories she had always dreamed of, longed for, and from the taut set of Leandro’s jaw she knew they were precious to him too. Precious and yet desecrated somehow—by what? What had happened to him? To his family?

She couldn’t bring herself to ask,
And then?

‘It’s those memories that I can’t bear to lose. They matter more than all my so-called heritage.’ He half turned to her, the faint smile now full-fledged, hard and cynical. ‘Pathetic, really.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Zoe said quietly. ‘I’d love to have memories like that.’

‘Would you? Even if what happened afterwards ruined everything—coloured it so it all seemed absurd and false?’

Zoe blinked at the ragged harshness in his voice. ‘At least you
have
memories.’

‘What are you saying?’ Leandro demanded. ‘You must have had parents—a family of some kind?’

‘I had—have—a mother.’ Zoe cut him off, her words flat.

Leandro stared at her for a moment before repeating her own question. ‘And then?’

‘I don’t know who my father is,’ Zoe told him. She felt heat rush up into her face and tried to control it. ‘I don’t think my mother does either.’ She’d never told anyone this—never exposed the shaming paucity of her childhood. ‘We didn’t have a home—not a villa like this, not a house or apartment, not anything.’

Leandro frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Now Zoe found herself smiling just as cynically as he had.
‘It’s hard for you to imagine, isn’t it, Leandro? You don’t even realise the luxury you had growing up. I’m not even talking about wealth or prestige. I mean a family. Two parents, a sister—more for all I know.’ She shook her head. ‘Something normal.’

‘It was far from normal,’ Leandro cut in harshly.

‘It sounds pretty wonderful to me,’ Zoe challenged. ‘Christmas, parties, football. It sounds like an American television show—happy families, Italian-style.’

‘Well, as I soon found out, it wasn’t.’

‘No? What happened?’ Zoe felt a flaring of anger, and it surprised her. Why did she care what had happened to Leandro’s family? What he’d felt or done about it? Why did it matter to
her
?

Yet it did; she couldn’t bear to see him throw it all away, no matter how bitter he was. He’d had something, something wonderful and he didn’t even realise it, wouldn’t acknowledge it.

‘What happened,’ Leandro said, his voice as sharp as broken glass, ‘is my father gambled everything away. Lost it all—squandered it, even.’

‘Like you’re doing.’

The silence following her pronouncement was both chilling and profound. Leandro’s eyes darkened, the skin around his mouth whitening with rage. ‘Are you comparing me to my father?’ he asked in a quiet, lethal voice, and Zoe knew that was the worst thing she could have done.

Still, her anger—as unreasonable as it might have been—fuelled her. ‘There seem to be some similarities.’

Leandro’s hand slashed through the air. ‘I am nothing—
nothing
like my father!’ His voice came out in a cry of desperation, a plea for mercy. ‘Nothing like him,’ he repeated in a savage whisper. His features twisted with regret, memory, fear.

‘What did he do that was so terrible?’ Zoe whispered.

Leandro was silent for so long, his face averted from her once more, that she wondered if he would ever answer. The room was dark save the one small circle of light from the delicate table lamp.

‘Do you know why I hired you?’ Leandro asked finally. His back was still to her, his voice was flat and unemotional, yet Zoe sensed the deep current of anger and disappointment underneath.

‘You told me earlier today it was because I didn’t know you,’ she replied evenly. ‘A perfect stranger, you said.’

‘Yes. Exactly. I wanted someone who had never heard the name Filametti. Who hadn’t seen my father and his trollops splashed across the tabloids. Who didn’t see my family as either a tragedy or a laughing stock.’

‘Well, you succeeded there,’ Zoe replied, struggling to maintain a calm tone. Leandro’s words were branding her brain: tragedy,
trollop
. ‘I’d never heard of you.’

‘Nearly everyone in Italy has,’ Leandro replied diffidently. ‘Georgio Filametti—my father—made sure of it. Oh, he was famous enough to begin with—although I don’t think I realised it as a child. How could I? As a child you simply accept the way things are as the only way they can be. You don’t know any different…or any better.’

‘I suppose that in your case that was true,’ Zoe replied, thinking it had certainly not been
her
situation. Even from a very young age she had been aware there was something unusual and even unnatural about her upbringing—her mother’s frantic flitting from anonymous city to anonymous city, her confused and unhappy daughter in tow.

‘He had everything going for him,’ Leandro said, and now there was disgust in his voice. ‘Related to royalty, Italy’s golden child, adored and intelligent too. He could have accepted everything as his due, given to him on a golden plate, but he worked hard. He was in finance, banking, and he made his own money.’

‘He sounds like a good man,’ Zoe said after a moment, when Leandro lapsed into silence once more.

‘I thought he was,’ Leandro agreed, his voice caught between bitterness and grief. ‘I
thought
he was. But he proved me—us—the whole of Italy wrong.’

Zoe kept silent. She could not imagine what Leandro’s father had done that was so unbearably unforgivable. Then Leandro dragged in a breath and told her, each word spat out like a loathsome, poisonous confession.

‘He lost it all,’ he said. ‘Gave it away. And for what? A few nights’ sordid pleasure.’ He glared at her in accusation, and Zoe
recoiled. She didn’t understand, but somehow this felt personal—as if Leandro were accusing
her
.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, struggling to raise her voice above an uncertain whisper.

‘My father was an addict of sorts,’ Leandro explained coolly. ‘Addicted to women—cheap women, mercenary women, glossy, but from the gutter all the same.’

‘He had affairs?’ Zoe clarified, and Leandro smiled mirthlessly.

‘Oh, he didn’t just have affairs. He had torrid, sordid,
pathetic
encounters.
He
was pathetic…Those women took him for everything he had. And I don’t just mean his money. I mean his dignity, his self-respect. His business began to fail, he started embezzling, and then one of his paramours began blackmailing him. Eventually it all came crashing down—a grand exposé in the papers, grainy photos of everything.’ Leandro’s mouth twisted. ‘And my father couldn’t face it. So he ran away. Disappeared to Monaco with what was left of his money, and left my mother to face it all.’

‘And you?’ Zoe surmised softly. ‘How old were you when this happened?’

Leandro looked surprised by the question. ‘Thirteen,’ he said shortly.

Thirteen. Zoe’s heart ached. Almost a man, and yet such a child. ‘And then?’ she asked quietly.

Leandro shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen him since. My mother died two years ago, and she never saw him again either. He’d left her shamed, a virtual pauper, smeared and ridiculed in every newspaper, and yet she still couldn’t hate him.’

Because you hated him enough already,
Zoe finished silently. She shook her head. It was a sad story—a tragedy, just as Leandro had said—and yet it seemed to her all the more tragic that he was selling this villa, throwing away the few good memories he had.

‘If your father lost everything, what happened to this villa?’

‘It couldn’t be lost,’ Leandro replied. ‘It was never his to begin with. It was my grandfather’s, and when he died last year it passed to me. Of course no one had the funds to restore it—
my grandfather had spent all his money paying my father’s debts. He managed to hold on to the villa only barely.’

‘So the villa’s ownership skipped over your father?’

Leandro smiled grimly. ‘My grandfather made that provision in his will after my father showed his true colours. Chasing after every tart who took what she could get.’

Zoe nodded, digesting this even as another echo began its insistent, remorseless beating in her brain.
You seem like the kind of girl who takes what she can get when she can get it. Who enjoys the ride and damns the consequences. Who doesn’t care…about anything.
Shock rippled icily through her, pooled like cold acid in her stomach. She was beginning to understand why this felt so personal.

‘And you think I’m just like them?’ she whispered, cruel comprehension making her feel sick, ashamed, though she knew she had nothing to be ashamed of. ‘Your father’s women—those heartless, blackmailing scum! You think I’m just like them. That’s why…’

Dizzily she stepped back from him, reaching for a chair to steady her, her fingers curling slickly around the burnished wood. She didn’t know why the realisation should hurt so much, should make her feel as if her heart was breaking. Her heart wasn’t even involved. It
couldn’t
be. Yet at that moment she felt as if someone had reached right down inside and wrenched it apart. She felt torn up inside, shattered into pieces…

It all made a kind of sickening sense now—why Leandro resisted his attraction to her, why he judged her so harshly.

I shouldn’t…want…

He was afraid of becoming like his father, of
being
his father—risking and ruining everything for
a girl like her
. A tart, a trollop, a cold-hearted,
blackmailing
—

Bile rose in her throat and she choked it down, willing herself not to cry, not to care.

Wasn’t that how she’d kept herself safe all these years? First as a child, losing best friends and favoured ‘uncles’ when her mother had decided it was time to move on, and then later, as an adult, when she’d followed in her mother’s footsteps, quite
literally, never staying long enough to know or be known, because she was afraid to try any other way. Afraid to be hurt.

Yet now she
was
hurt. Now she hurt all over.

Leandro turned slowly to look at her. There was a new, naked desolation in his face, a bleakness in his eyes that somehow seemed strangely vulnerable. ‘No, Zoe,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think that. You’re not like them at all.’

Tears, treacherous tears, gathered at the corners of her eyes and she dashed at them angrily. ‘But you said—’

‘I think I was trying to prove to myself that you were. And you must admit you
do
project a certain image.’ Leandro’s sudden wry smile took the sting out of his words.

‘Image…’ Zoe repeated numbly. It was all about image. Who she pretended to be because it was safer. It wasn’t who she really was—who she’d
ever
been.

‘Is it just an image?’ Leandro asked softly. ‘Who are you really, Zoe Clark? Why did you come to Italy? What are you running away from? Because I am beginning to think you have secrets—perhaps as many as I do.’

Yes, she did. And the fact that he’d guessed made Zoe ache. She almost
wanted
him to know, to tell him all of it, to finally be known. Understood. Accepted.

Loved.

His hand reached out slowly, hypnotically, to brush a strand of hair away from her cheek. ‘And,’ he added, his voice lowered to a rasp, ‘why can’t I get you out of my mind?’

‘I can’t get you out of mine either,’ Zoe admitted shakily.

They stared at each other, silent, still, and Zoe knew it was a moment for making decisions. For turning away if they could. And surely that was the safer, saner course of action? She already knew she was in way too deep—cared far too much. Yet she couldn’t—didn’t even want to. Under Leandro’s penetrating stare she felt vulnerable, emotionally bare, and even though it terrified her it was something she wanted. Craved. To know and be known.
Finally.

She didn’t know who moved first, who gave in before the other. It didn’t matter. One moment they were simply staring at
one another, and the next they were a tangle of arms, of legs and lips and skin, seeking and finding again and again, like deepwater divers desperate for air.